Religious bias motivated 1,538 hate crimes past year - over half against Jews, and about one-quarter against Muslims.

Of the 7,615 overall victims, 4,720 were victims of crimes against persons (both adults and juveniles), 2,813 were victims of crimes against property, and 82 were victims of hate crimes categorized as crimes against society (e.g., weapons violations, drug offenses, gambling).

Excluding a handful of "multiple bias" incidents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said 57.5 percent of all incidents previous year were based on hate related to race, ethnicity or ancestry.

In the FBI's press release, the types of hate crimes were classified as intimidation (44.7%), simple assault (35.7%), and aggravated assault (18.5%).

In short, hate crimes can and do happen just about anywhere.

While the data provides a way to compare annual hate crime statistics, the number of actual hate crime incidents is believed to drastically under reported, according to advocacy groups.

"Hate crimes can and do happen just about anywhere", the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in releasing the data.

Meanwhile, nearly one in five of last year's hate crimes were motivated by prejudices related to sexual orientation, 63 percent of them targeting gay men.

At the time, Cobb police said the higher number could be attributed to a computer system that lets officers designate an incident as a hate crime. In Maryland, such crimes declined from 43 in 2015 to 37 in 2016. Anti-white incidents increased from 613 incidents in 2015 to 720 incidents in 2016.

Of the 6,121 criminal incidents reported, 6,063 were single-bias incidents (there were also 58 multiple-bias incidents).

"There's a unsafe disconnect between the rising problem of hate crimes and the lack of credible data being reported", said ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt.

Data from California State University at San Bernardino indicate that hate crime has continued to rise in major US cities in 2017.